E-mail may be an a quick way to deliver electronic newsletters and sales pitches to your customers informing them about sales, promotions and new products, but it’s time to ask yourself just how effective your e-mail marketing efforts are.
Many business owners use e-newsletters to inform their customers about their businesses, sales, special deals and products. However, if your e-newsletter content is not hitting the mark, then your efforts could be in vain.
You will find that if your customer isn’t in the market for what you are offering at a particular point in time, then it is highly likely your message will be deleted and effectively wiped from your customer’s memory. What you wanted your e-newsletter to achieve, that is, generate interest in your business and in turn profits, has been lost.
Timing is everything, and with the number of businesses using e-mail as a vital marketing tool, customers are often swamped with offers. This means they are less likely to “save” a marketing e-mail for future reference as they are generally swamped with them on a daily basis.
What you need to do is generate additional interest in your e-newsletter rather than just using it as an electronic price list.
You need to encourage your e-newsletter recipients to save and store your newsletters and the information contained so they can refer to it at a later date or when they have a need for your particular business.
By filling your e-newsletter with more “customer-friendly” information, recipients are more likely to save it, print it and forward it to their friends, which further expands your marketing efforts. It is also important to remember that saved e-mail have the potential to be used over and over again.
By “customer-friendly” information, we mean information that is valuable or interesting to the customer, other than information directly associated to a particular product. This type of content can include “how to” articles that may be related to your product. For example if you are selling a new paint product, apart from listing the price and features of the paint, you may considering putting in some decorating tips, Feng Shui examples or articles that explain the relationship between colour and mood, etc. If you are in the cosmetics business, you may want to include beauty tips or how to accentuate the eyes with make-up techniques.
That way, recipients may be more inclined to save the information and share it with friends. If they didn’t have a need for your product at the time when your e-newsletter was sent, later on they may remember your newsletter and refer back to it for your product.
Product reviews are another option you can use as content for your e-newsletter. Make sure that your e-newsletters contain company information. They should also provide customers with a link to your Web site.
